Good essay on “Big History”

Good essay on “Big History”

This topic has fascinated me for a while. I won’t take you through the entire essay, as this fellow did, but I will call your attention to it. And urge you to look more into ]]

…because as long as we teach history as a story of competing tribes, wars are going to repeat themselves and all the horrors of World War I are going to repeat themselves. I’d stumbled on the same sort of idea: We need a history of humanity…

I’ve floated the idea that what I call collective learning may be what makes us different: in other words, the capacity of humans to share information with such precision and in such volume that information at the cultural level increases from generation to generation. That’s a fundamental threshold; it’s what defines us. It explains why communities are so various, because each community accumulates information in slightly different ways. It explains why when communities meet the synergies are so powerful. It’s the source of technology. It’s the source of science. It’s the source of civilization. It’s what makes everything that’s human.